The USA has the world's largest confirmed oil supply...problem is that a bunch of it is in the green river shale deposit formation. There an an estimated 3 times the oil in the green river shale as has ever been discovered in SA. We just have to get desperate enough to get to it.

The USA has the world's largest confirmed oil supply...problem is that a bunch of it is in the green river shale deposit formation. There an an estimated 3 times the oil in the green river shale as has ever been discovered in SA. We just have to get desperate enough to get to it.

The type of shale in the Green River shale formation is not like today's unconventional shale oil unlocked by fracking. This shale is in the form of kerogen that literally has to be cooked & thermally cracked out of the rock. Biggest problem is it contains a lot of arsene and nobody has come up with a good way to deal with that yet. Some waters near prior shale oil facilities run by organizations like the U S Navy & Unocal have some real problems with arsene contamination, and the arsene in the oil has to be removed before it can be refined. When one company shut down their operations they could not find a scrap yard on the planet that would accept their dearsenator reactors and internals so they were encased in concrete and abandoned in place. Shell tried a method of freezing the groundwater around the mining operation last decade but gave up on that technology approach (and I personally expressed serious doubts on that working out to my boss at the time that went to work for Shell). There will have to be some technological breakthroughs in this area, or an extreme rollback in environmental regulation, for extracting oil from this shale to resume again. I dismantled the greater part of a refinery that accepted dearsenated shale oil as feed in Fruita, CO in 1995 for shipment to Texas to be re-erected as part of the conventional crude oil refinery I worked at back then. The Unocal equipment that could be re-used was shipped to Unocal refineries around that same time frame. No idea on the fate of the USN facility.

I think ARCO had some TV commercisls about this oil shale showing a spokesperson holding a chunk of flaming rock while talking about this oil shale back in the 1980's. If I can find & isolate such a clip, I'll post it here.

edit - a blurb about TOSCO which was eventually purchased / merged with Phillips 66. They were known for some horrendous industrial accidents in their late years.